"Moody" was a magnificent slice of sound recorded in 1981 by ESG, three sisters from the South Bronx. Rick Owens had the song running around in his head when he was thinking about Fall 2014 for men, so that's what he called his collection. The men he was thinking of were moody cops, emblems of the authority that he—and millions like him—rejected in their testosterone-raddled youths. "Suddenly you're 50 and you're the authority," Owens said, with what would have been rue in anyone else. Authority can have connotations of dominance and submission. Which is how the art of Tom of Finland came to insinuate itself in today's collection, with the boots, belt buckles, and holsters of Tom's overripe macho men in uniform abstracted into the details of the clothes.

Those abstractions were much less obvious than the flak vests in duchesse satin that appeared later in the show, but their (implied) presence seemed perversely appropriate to a collection which, in Owens' telling, was heavy with symbolism: The black leather of brutal authority was, for example, balanced by the cashmere head wraps that symbolized benevolent nuns. They seemed to parallel some kind of internal struggle for the designer. "I'm talking myself out of punishing myself for not being perfect," he said. So in effect he is both dominator and dominated.